A shtetl that vanished
Shimon Peres was born Szymon Perski on August 2, 1923, in Wiszniew, a small Jewish town in Poland that is now Vishnyeva in Belarus. His father, Yitzhak, was a prosperous timber merchant; his mother, Sara, was a librarian who gave him a love of literature. The family spoke Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian at home. The decisive influence of his childhood was his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Zvi Meltzer, who taught him Talmud; Peres later recalled that he was more observant than his parents as a boy.
His father emigrated to Palestine in 1932, and the family followed in 1934, when Shimon was eleven. Those who stayed behind did not survive. During the Holocaust the Jews of Wiszniew, including Rabbi Meltzer, were murdered by the Nazis, many burned alive in the town’s synagogue. Peres would say in his Nobel lecture that had it not been for his family’s dream of Israel, he would probably have perished in the flames with them.
Kibbutz, Negev and Ben-Gurion
He grew up in Tel Aviv and then at the Ben Shemen agricultural youth village, before helping to found Kibbutz Alumot near the Sea of Galilee, where he worked as a farmer and shepherd. He became a leader of the Labour Zionist youth movement HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed, and caught the eye of David Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson. In 1944 he led an unauthorised expedition into the Negev, then a closed military zone, to scout for future Jewish settlement; the group was arrested and jailed in Beersheba. On the trip they saw a nest of bearded vultures, peres in Hebrew, and he took the bird’s name as his own.
In 1945 he married Sonia Gelman, whom he had met at Ben Shemen; she had served as a truck driver in the British Army. She avoided public life throughout his career, and they had three children. In 1947 Ben-Gurion brought him into the Haganah to handle manpower and arms purchasing, and during the 1948 war he worked on procurement and briefly headed the navy.
The boy who armed Israel
After a period heading the Defence Ministry’s delegation in the United States, where he studied at the New School and New York University and attended a Harvard management course, Peres was appointed deputy director-general of the Defence Ministry in 1952 and director-general in 1953, aged twenty-nine. Over the next six years he built Israel’s strategic relationship with France, which became the young state’s main arms supplier, tanks, Mystère and later Mirage jets, and he helped plan the secret Sèvres agreement under which Israel, Britain and France launched the 1956 Suez campaign.
He also laid foundations for the domestic defence industry, reorganising the RAFAEL weapons development authority in 1958, and he is widely regarded as the architect of the nuclear research centre at Dimona, built with French help from the late 1950s. Israel has never confirmed whether it possesses nuclear weapons, and Peres was a principal guardian of that policy of ambiguity. Critics of these years point to the secrecy of the programme and to Israel’s part in the Suez collusion; supporters credit him with giving a small, besieged state the means to survive.
Knesset, defence and Entebbe
Peres entered the Knesset for Mapai in 1959 and served as deputy defence minister until 1965, negotiating with President John F. Kennedy the sale of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, the first sale of American military equipment to Israel. In 1965 he followed Ben-Gurion out of Mapai into the breakaway Rafi party with Moshe Dayan, and helped bring it back into the new Labour Party in 1968. He held a succession of ministries before becoming minister of defence in Yitzhak Rabin’s government in 1974, after losing the party leadership contest to Rabin by a narrow margin, the start of a rivalry that shaped Israeli politics for twenty years.
As defence minister in July 1976 he pressed for a military rescue when an Air France plane was hijacked to Entebbe in Uganda, and the operation freed the hostages; its commander, Yonatan Netanyahu, was killed. In these years Peres was regarded as a hawk, and he supported early Jewish settlement in the West Bank, a position he later abandoned.
Unity government and the economy
Peres became leader of the Labour Party in 1977, after Rabin stepped down, and led it to its first ever defeat, against Menachem Begin. He lost again in 1981 and drew in 1984, when Labour and Likud formed a national unity government with a rotating premiership: Peres served as prime minister from September 1984 to October 1986, then swapped posts with Yitzhak Shamir.
His premiership confronted a crisis. Israel’s annual inflation had reached several hundred per cent, and the country’s debt and deficits were spiralling. In July 1985 his cabinet adopted the Economic Stabilisation Plan, sharp budget cuts, a devaluation and wage and price restraint agreed with the Histadrut labour federation, backed by American aid. Inflation fell dramatically within a year, and the plan is often cited as a model for ending hyperinflation. He also began the withdrawal of Israeli forces from most of Lebanon to a security zone in the south. As foreign minister in 1987 he reached a secret framework agreement with King Hussein of Jordan in London, which Shamir rejected.
Oslo
After losing the Labour leadership to Rabin in 1992, Peres became foreign minister in Rabin’s government and sponsored the secret back-channel talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization, conducted in Norway by his protégé Yossi Beilin and academics. On September 13, 1993, Peres signed the Declaration of Principles, the first Oslo Accord, on the White House lawn as Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands. The agreement created the Palestinian Authority and set out a path toward a permanent settlement. In October 1994 Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty, and that December Peres, Rabin and Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize; one member of the Nobel committee resigned in protest at Arafat’s inclusion.
Peres set out his vision in The New Middle East (1993): a region bound by trade, water, technology and tourism rather than armies. Opponents on the Israeli right saw the accords as a dangerous gamble that brought armed groups to Israel’s borders, and the wave of suicide bombings that followed hardened that view; on the Palestinian side, many came to see Oslo as a framework that deepened occupation rather than ending it.
After Rabin
On November 4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist at a peace rally in Tel Aviv that Peres had attended moments before. Peres became prime minister and defence minister. In April 1996, responding to Hezbollah rocket fire, he launched Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon; Israeli shelling struck a UN compound at Qana, killing more than a hundred Lebanese civilians who had sought shelter there, and the operation drew international condemnation. In May 1996 he narrowly lost Israel’s first direct election for prime minister to Benjamin Netanyahu.
He founded the Peres Center for Peace in 1996 to promote joint Israeli-Arab projects in health, economics and education. His later career was a series of defeats and comebacks: he lost the 2000 presidential vote in the Knesset to Moshe Katsav, served as foreign minister under Ariel Sharon, drawing criticism from the left for staying in that government during the second intifada, and in 2005, after losing the Labour leadership, left the party he had served for six decades to join Sharon’s new Kadima. Peres also drew criticism for his statements on the Armenian genocide, which he was reported as declining to call a genocide, a characterisation the Israeli Foreign Ministry later partly disputed.
President and elder statesman
On June 13, 2007, the Knesset elected Peres the ninth President of Israel, the first former prime minister to hold the office; he had sat in the Knesset for some forty-eight years, longer than anyone in its history. As president he became Israel’s most recognised ambassador, an enthusiast for science and start-ups, brain research and nanotechnology, and, in his late eighties, an unexpected star of social media. Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Sonia, who had stayed in their Tel Aviv apartment rather than move to the president’s residence, died in 2011.
Peres was a lifelong reader and a writer of poetry and songs, and the author of numerous books, from David’s Sling to his memoir Battling for Peace. He left office in 2014 at ninety, then the world’s oldest head of state. He died on September 28, 2016, after a stroke, and was buried on Mount Herzl between Rabin and Shamir. Delegations from more than seventy countries came to his funeral, including Obama and the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
Legacy
Few people were present at so many of Israel’s turning points. Peres helped build the military and technological power on which the state relies, and then spent the second half of his life arguing that power alone could not bring security. His foreign ties, his defence-industry work and his championing of innovation fed directly into the country’s later high-tech economy; the nuclear research centre at Dimona was renamed after him following his death.
His peace legacy is more contested. The Oslo process he championed did not produce the settlement he envisioned, and critics on both sides hold it responsible for different failures. Yet the treaty with Jordan endures, and his refusal to give up on the idea of reconciliation, “permit me to remain an optimist” he asked on becoming president, made him, for many around the world, the face of an Israel that hoped for peace.
Sources & further reading
Shimon Peres, Wikipedia · Shimon Peres, Jewish Virtual Library · Shimon Peres, Nobel Lecture, NobelPrize.org · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.